The Story So Far...

Banging My Head Against a Wall... And Loving It.

I'm not a developer. Historically, I couldn't code to save my life, and the few times in my career that I've tried to get into coding in some way didn't go particularly well. It started back when Apple opened up the AppStore, and released an SDK to allow third-parties to develop apps for the iPhone. I got as far as installing the IDE and buying one of those "For Dummies..." books on Objective-C, and even made it a few chapters in before it became a paperweight. Fast forward a few years and I'd reached a point where I could cobble together a few basic shell commands and PowerShell scripts, but nothing particularly useful or exciting for anyone other than myself. For as long as I've been in IT, I've never really had to level-up my coding skills, or even understand how certain things really worked under the hood. That just wasn't my area of focus, and I was okay with that for a while.

But then a few years ago I started watching a LOT of videos put out by another Chuck, and at one point, I would say to myself "dammit, Chuck, this could have been you." I noticed though, that it seemed like every time I watched another one of his YouTube videos or poked around at the various lessons and articles he'd write for some IT Training websites, I found myself more and more fascinated by this whole swath of IT that I'd never capitalized on learning, and it occurred to me that my skillset was starting to get a little stale. NetworkChuck, if you ever come across this post, thank you for lighting a fire under my ass.

So, I knew that I wanted to dive deeper into the areas of IT that I hadn't had a lot of real-world exposure to, and thankfully my degree program gave me an outlet for that. Linux administration, databases, some basic web design fundamentals, and a few classes on the foundations of what scripting/programming is all about. I did very well in each of these classes, but still, these were not really areas that I was getting daily exposure to in my professional life. Whooooo-boy, did that change.

So fast forward to June of 2022, and an assignment handed to me by what I was hoping would be my new employer. Part of my interview process required me to spin up an app (which, thank Lilith, required only that it be forked from another repo) and instrument our monitoring agents to analyze and track its performance. Going through this assignment it became painfully clear that I had no idea what was behind most of what I'd be getting myself into in this job. What the hell is NGINX? What's a Kubernetes? You can do that in Python?

On-the-job training and self-guided research has brought me to what I could still only call an apprentice-level understanding of a lot of the underlying tech that I'm now dealing with on a regular basis. After a few months to ramp up in my new position and get familiar with our tools and processes, it still nags at me that I'm not quite to a place where I want to be, personally and professionally, when it comes to some specific areas.

So, here's where this website comes in. The pages you see here are being hosted by a run of the mill provider to act as a landing page. I have a few servers hosted elsewhere that I've spun up as a development and testing lab for all kinds of things that I've just never actually done before:

• Running my own web server via NGINX (because I absolutely can't stand Apache).

• Creating my own website on that web server without using WordPress (my rage at WP knows no bounds...).

• Writing a few apps in Python, Go, and whatever else I can, and serving them from this site.

• Deploying a containerized environment using tools like Docker and Kubernetes. I don't even know what I'll do with them yet.

• Learning how to correctly instrument for, observe, detect, analyze, and triage issues for all of the above with New Relic.

I've been banging my head against a wall for the last 5 days putting this all together, but I'm loving it because I'm learning, and making it work. I get so caught up in one part of one task that I leave other tasks for this endeavor unfinished (SQUIRREL!), but piece by piece it's coming together. Hell, the whole time I've spent writing this post, I was originally going to use trying to figure out how to get NGINX to actually work right as a web server on one of my test boxes. Maybe once I get some of the structural bits in place, I'll be able to focus a bit more.

So that's why I'm here. Well, okay, that's one part of why I'm here. I also want to be able to share more about myself on this platform. Two topics that come to mind are music production (another area I've dabbled in for a LONG time but haven't felt like I've done "enough"), and the the wild adventures I'm finding myself on as a first-time father. And since I decided to sever all ties with social media, this seemed like the next best venue.

Stick around, maybe it'll get interesting.